


You're Like A Bullet In My Chest

by th_esaurus



Category: 3:10 to Yuma (2007)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Illustrated, M/M, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-16
Updated: 2016-07-16
Packaged: 2018-07-24 11:06:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7505893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/pseuds/th_esaurus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Now, Ben had assumed to take the boy with him for a few score miles, until his horse tired of carrying the weight of one and a half men, and then to leave him with a warm jacket and directions to the nearest township. But the debt of life is not something so easily brushed aside. Ben fought hard his whole life to owe nobody nothing, and to have the same afforded him in return; but Charlie Prince was his now, whether he wanted him or not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You're Like A Bullet In My Chest

**Author's Note:**

> All artwork by the incredibly talented and generous [littledozerdraws](http://littledozerdraws.tumblr.com/). Thank you so much for introducing me to this fandom, letting me yell at you about it, and then giving me something so beautiful in return.
> 
> Thanks as well to everyone who let me throw this at them while I was writing. You all made it so much smoother.

 

He would not have been able to look at Charlie Prince in the same way. That was why he did it, Ben supposed.

*

He had already begun to make a name for himself when Charlie fell in with him.

Only fourteen, Charlie had already taken as many lives as he had years under his belt. Now, Ben Wade had a number of thoughts about retribution and justice, many of which he took from the Old Testament and shaped to his liking, and he had not become such a gun sharp as he was practicing only on raccoons and tin cans. But Charlie, from the start, had a thirst for killing. Enjoyed the sport of it. It was his prerogative.

It gave him a skill set that Ben found quite useful in building up a reputation.

He came across Charlie in Yell County, drawn in by a plume of smoke that rose up across the plains as though it were sucking the night sky down into the town. The fire got loud as he idled nearby on his horse; Ben was not one to offer help without knowing the reward, and even then the odds had to be vastly in his favour. The townsfolk were watching the fire with a fearful distance, many in their nightshirts and boots, woken from their sleep by devilish heat.

Ben figured the burning shack was a prison. Nobody inside worth saving. From his experience, most interred folk were there for pick-pocketing and land disputes gone violent; but the common man wouldn't risk his neck for a scurrilous thief.

And neither would he, Ben thought. Though he was not quite common.

He was turning his horse about as something caught his eye. A flurry of rags caught in the currents of the flame by the burning doorway; no, no, a slip of a boy inside those rags, his neck and ankles bound in iron, the great hoop of the chains yanked free from the weak timber floor but too wide to fit through the cell. Ben clucked his tongue and moved his horse on slowly, a few steps. If the boy struggled there long he might get lucky: the heat of the fire might warp the metal enough to let him tug free. Or he might burn to blackened bones before he got the chance.

A few more steps. The boy, Ben noted, had a stone in his hand, frantically chiselling at the chain around his neck.

Or—not a stone, no; a flint. The kind that started fires.

The townsfolk were drifting back home as the flames grew higher. It would burn itself out, and they could pick through the corpses and kindling in the morning. Clear the plot away and build the jail anew to fill with men whose petty transgressions rendered them low.

Ben had a weak heart, and hated himself for it as he dismounted his horse, cussing under his breath. The heat of the fire was blistering and became unbearable as he leapt up the crumbling porch. The smell, too, was sour enough to make him retch. That undeniable smell of burning flesh and human fat.

"Hold fast," he shouted above the din, and grabbed the boy by the scruff of the neck, pushing his head forward. Like a cat, the boy went limp, still. Ben pressed the muzzle of his gun against the rusting padlock on the collar, shot once, twice, and it came free with an almighty thunk. He yanked the chain until it unspooled from the ankle cuffs, and half dragged the boy away from the flames.

The porch collapsed behind them. Ben pushed the boy up on his horse's saddle and mounted up behind him, and spat wetly on the ground for the benefit of the townsfolk.

That was how he met Charlie Prince. He assumed, for a good few days, that Charlie's eyes were an amber brown, the colour of fresh embers, and it was only when he took a second glance that he realised it had been a trick of the light. The fire reflected in his wide pupils.

Charlie's eyes were green.

Now, Ben had assumed to take the boy with him for a few score miles, until his horse tired of carrying the weight of one and a half men, and then to leave him with a warm jacket and directions to the nearest township. But the debt of life is not something so easily brushed aside. Ben fought hard his whole life to owe nobody nothing, and to have the same afforded him in return; but Charlie Prince was his now, whether he wanted him or not.

Ben had been travelling alone for a few weeks, three or four men loosely pledged to him that he could call on for a raid, but he was lying low, wandering wide in the autumn months. Learning the lay of Arizona's fine lands, her farms, her people, and where the Southern Pacific Railway Company might happen to be passing through. He bought plenty of people plenty of drinks to pry that information out of them, which was not exactly an unenjoyable way to spend a few weeks of reconnaissance.

But now he had the kid nipping at his heels. Ben set up camp near the Gila, let his horse drink her fill and then looped her reins around a low-hanging branch. He fished a few stale crackers out of his saddlebag - not the good cans of beans, though he had several - and tossed them to the boy. His bare chest and cheeks were blackened with soot, and Ben could've played his ribcage with a pair of spoons. "Eat," Ben told him, since he seemed to be waiting for some kind of permission. "Then get yourself cleaned up and come back here and tell me your tale."

"Name's Charlie," was the first thing the boy said to him, his raggedy blond hair falling limp and damp in front of his wide, green eyes.

 

"Just Charlie? Nothin' more? What's your Paw's name?"

"That sonnuva whore."

"Now you go round slinging that insult often enough," Ben said, mild, dangerous, "you'll hit a fair few bullseyes. How's about your Grandaddy?"

"Dead," the boy said, without much feeling at all.

"And what'd they call him when he was livin'?" It was like drawing blood from the side of a mountain. The boy had a funny, affected way of talking, like it'd taken him a long time to learn and he'd never quite perfected the art. He was old enough that his voice was almost fully broke, but he still lilted on the higher pitch.

"—Prince," he said, like he was chewing grit.

"Monarch blood in you, is there? Not many friends in the South I should reckon, with a name like that."

No friends nowhere, it turned out: Charlie was a killer. Not to say anything of the men he lit up in that prison pyre, he was in there for a reason. The boy was apprenticed to a drunken blacksmith, hammering horse shoes all the livelong day. He had offered the job only as he was sweet on Charlie's mother - Missy Prince, he called her, though her name was Annabelle - and Charlie, tired of seeing her coyly wave off his stinking breath and sozzled advances, had taken his smithing hammer to the old pig's skull instead.

It was not, Charlie told him haltingly, the first soul he had put to rest. Just the first he was caught at.

Ben considered him.

"You ever read the Bible, Charlie Prince?"

"No, boss. I ain't care for reading."

"Can you handle a gun, Charlie?"

"Yes, boss." He nodded, rapt now. The talk of death had got his blood up.

"Can you shoot true, a hundred yards?"

"Yes, boss, I can, two pistols n'all."

"I ain't your boss," Ben said mildly. He slapped his palms down on his thighs, to signal the final word. "Well, son. You've had a day of it, to be sure. Get some shuteye and we'll see about your two pistols in the morning. The Lord detests lyin' lips, Charlie Prince, and so do I. Sleep now."

That night, Ben watched the boy's sallow chest rise and fall evenly, the deep sleep of someone who cares very little what cause blood is shed for. He thought to wandering down to the river, picking a wet, heavy stone from the bank, and staving the boy's restful head in with it. Save them both the trouble of companionship.

Ben sighed. He had, after all, that weak heart.

*

Now, here's a funny thing: Ben Wade did not consider himself any kind of decent draughtsman, but he drew as a hobby, and knew he was not bad with a scrap of paper and a stubby pencil.

He tried to sketch Charlie two or three times over the years. But there was something about him that left Ben dissatisfied every damn time. His features too close together, somehow, his eyes too bright to shade, the dry red of his lips just a smudge. Ben found flitting birds easier to put to paper.

Found a hummingbird's wing easier to see than Charlie Prince.

*

The earth turned. Ben Wade swelled his coffers in more ways than one.

He made a tentative truce with a bear of a man named Jackson, whose path they crossed in a boarding house during the harsh winter of '77. Jackson had smelled money near the Mexican border but found the law there jumpy and easy to startle after a series of bad bank hits by a pair of Yankee bandits. He was wearing rotting wolf skins he'd bartered for and stank to high hell, but he had a pair of iron fists on him, proved himself as a heavy in a petty spat over the price of stale bread. Ben watched him lazily from a dark corner, and had Charlie enquire about his room; offered Jackson a decent cut so long as he'd saddle up with them and no other, and take a goddamn bath afore he did.

As a threesome they made decent work of two or three Southern Pacific wagons, long before the Company got jittery about Ben's name. He had given Charlie a good revolver, a Navy that he practiced with often on Arizona's hardy fauna, and the boy gave him sound returns on his investment. He would breathe heavy after a kill, and Ben often gently shushed him in case he spooked his horse.

The fourth Southern raid could have been a hatchet job: two inexperienced Pinks escorting the wagon that Ben hadn't accounted for. They weren't the problem, and Jackson sent them running into the desert while Charlie picked them off for fun at an impressive distance.

A bullet whistled past Ben's left ear. He didn't feel the pain of it until he felt the hot trickle of blood.

"Down!" he barked, and they all hit the dusty ground.

The second bullet zipped through where he'd been standing not half a second after they fell. "There's a ridge about fifty paces back, sou'west," Ben yelled, "You clock it, Charlie?"

"You hurt?" Charlie called back, distant and a little strangled.

"Did you see the damn ridge?"

"I got it, boss."

"After the next shot, when he reloads—"

Jackson let off an almighty yelp, the bullet skimming clean through his left calf. Like a whippet, Charlie scrambled up, sprinted away across the dustbowl. Ben kept his head down, listened to his skittering footsteps get further and further. He was not a praying man, and he did not pray for Charlie Prince. But he did hold his breath.

Five seconds.

Eight.

And then he heard the fierce thud of Charlie's boot connecting with flesh. A low yell.

The sharp-shooter was an unkempt Mexican, and Charlie would have ripped his throat out with his teeth had Ben not stepped in to tame him. He was not strong but he was wily, and he'd had at the Mexican's face with his nails, and broken his nose with the butt of his gun. Used it like a damn club.

Ben approached with one hand outstretched to quell Charlie, and the other loaded, on the fallen sniper. He was smart enough to stay down.

"You best use that pistol what it's meant for, Charlie," Ben said evenly. The boy got his barrel pointed right side up at last. His arm was near trembling.

Christ Almighty, but the boy did get excited when there was blood shed in Ben Wade's name.

"What're those Pinkertons payin' you to pick off their buzzards?" Ben asked pointedly, looking over at the abandoned wagon. The Mexican said nothing. "I'll reckon it's not even a ten percent cut of what they're haulin'."

And how's about that? Ben reckoned right.

Jackson survived his wound, though he did make a fuss over it. The sharp-shooter quietly joined their ranks. And all the while they trotted on to the next town, Charlie Prince never strayed his horse more than an arm's length from Ben Wade's side.

*

The boy grew, fiery and rough. He had a red tint to his cheeks and whiskers, and his chest filled out respectably. He did not speak much, except to second Ben's opinions, and he got fast with his trigger finger, barely a pause between aiming and shooting.

He was not as swift as Ben was with the Hand of God, and never would be.

He let his beard grow out unkempt, careless, and scratched at it incessantly in the night. Ben's weakness was annoyance, and he had killed men out of spiteful temper. They'd picked up an Arkansas boy some months back, scant few years older than Charlie and a dab hand with a lock pick, who had the habit of biting his finger- and toe-nails whenever they made camp, spitting the trimmings off into the brush with a genuine _p-tooey_ sound.

"You wanna quit that," Ben told him. Not a question. Jackson and Tommy had guffawed, recognising his tone.

"Don't let it get to ya, Mister Wade," he'd replied, chipper, a toothy yellow grin.

Two days later, Charlie had pinned the boy down against the dusty ground with his knees and elbows, his hand a vice around the boy's wrist, while Ben shot off three of his fingers at the knuckle. He screamed an awful ruckus, and his blood splattered on Charlie's chin and lips. "Tempted as you may be," Ben said to him softly, while the boy rolled and sobbed over his stump hand, "I wouldn't put your tongue to that."

He pulled Charlie close, and took a pocket handkerchief from inside his jacket, spat on it, and wiped him clean like a prissy mother might. This close up, his eyes were goddamn emeralds.

They packed up camp and left the Arkansas boy to bleed out in the desert.

Still, Ben made the effort to curtail Charlie's particular habit before it got to that state. They passed through Jerome in midsummer, the townsfolk on their porches too lazy with heat to do anything more than acknowledge the gang's arrival with nods and flashes of their pistols. Ben told his boys to hitch their horses at the trough and whet their own appetites however they pleased, whether it be women or whiskey. As for Charlie, he grabbed the boy by the scruff of his ratty shirt and dragged him through the Main Street until they reached a barber. Ben shooed out the dozing owner with his gun: he didn't much believe in paying a man to do something he could do himself.

He sat Charlie down hard on a wooden stool, forced his chin up. "You ain't no child anymore, Charlie Prince, and you ain't just any man, but my man. My right hand. I want you to start looking fuckin' respectable, not some goddamn feral thing I picked up in the territories. You were birthed to me in flame and fury and I want you to fuckin' inspire it, you hear?"

Charlie said nothing. His lips were slightly parted, breathing through his mouth, and his eyes roved wildly across Ben's face. Ben had no clue, after all these years, if Charlie had a speck of faith in his blackened soul - killers tended to pick and choose their Commandments, which amused Ben no end. He wondered if Charlie Prince had ever wrestled with the Lord's great and terrible proclamation: _thou shalt have no other God than me._

When he looked at Ben Wade like that, Ben could surely believe it.

Ben took a pair of scissors to Charlie's beard and trimmed it slowly, painstakingly, holding his neck and tilting his chin up with his thumb. Not too close to the skin, a strong little beard and moustache that showed off his jaw, his ruddy lips, the cut of his cheekbones. His skin was only a shade or two different than the blonde of his hair, and he was, Ben could see, densely freckled. He blinked rarely. Drunk on Ben's proximity. Ben did not meet his eyes.

His mother, as best he remembered, had green eyes, shimmery and pleasant, like dewy grass on a morning somewhere far from the barren South. The woman who had first taken him to bed had dusky olive eyes too, though her pupils were wide with drink and the low brothel lamps.

He had also bedded a man, he recalled, who had looked up at him from his knees with glassy bottle-green eyes and his mouth made pinkish where it stretched around Ben's cock.

"Like a new penny," Ben said fondly, when he was done, standing back. This newly neat, Charlie looked somehow contained. A decent dam holding in a wild torrent. It was an unsettling vision, and Ben trusted that strangers and Pinks would be unsettled well enough too.

"'Preciate it, boss," Charlie breathed. He sounded rode hard, wrung out, and Ben though of telling him to get into the town, get his dick wet, or at the very least ride out a mile or two and shoot something to unbottle whatever was going on in his heaving chest.

He did not make the suggestion out loud.

Their very next job, Charlie spent his whole cut of the takings in a tailor's. Ben did not accompany him, but he left wearing a shabby, mud-flecked shawl and heavy black boots, and returned looking like his namesake: a goddamn prince. The cream coat was pinned all the way down with brass buttons, and seemed to clip him at the waist, make his shoulders broad; he had on a pair of chaps made of fine enough leather to make a rancher spit with envy. When he unbuttoned his collar in the daytime heat, Ben caught a shock of regal purple underneath, as though Charlie, who had never bought a nice shirt in his damn life, had not known how to tell the difference between taste and ostentation.

He wore a wide-brimmed hat that shaded his eyes to a dullish brown. Ben appreciated that. He was finding himself more and more often—

Distracted.

Tommy whistled as Charlie took his place at Ben's side. "Ain't he something? A right regular peacock," he said, mocking, looking to the rest of the crew for backup.

But Ben was not smiling at his fun, and so nobody else ventured forth an opinion, compliment or otherwise.

*

Charlie Prince was a study in evolution, but he made mistakes.

They had a good routine worked out. Ben Wade was enough of a myth to draw talented men into his drift, and along with Campos, his sniper, he had an Apache who knew the land better than any, a demolitions man, preferred dynamite over pistols, a nervy engineer named Kinter who kept their arsenal in clean and working order and could kill anything with a single shotgun shell.

It was assumed by all parties that Charlie Prince was, unquestioned, his second in command. Ben supposed it true.

They were making it a successful dozen hits on the unfortunate Southern Pacific, when Ben noticed, abruptly, that Charlie was shooting with both hands. Took down weak-willed Pinkerton with his Navy, then, instead of reloading, pulled a second pistol with his left hand, from his right hip, and shot that off as well. Took the man clean down. The gun was showy, commemorative, and had an eagle carved into the ivory handle. It matched Charlie's coat nicely, and though Ben trusted his own Colt more than he trusted a great many men, he knew that year's stock and knew that it was prone to misfire. A braggart's gun, not a gunman's tool.

He had last seen it in the holster of a small town deputy whose spurs were too clean to earn Ben's respect, and who had thought he could take on the so-called Ben Wade gang single handed after they marched into his territory. Ben had no quarrels with the local Marshall, and no reason to hit the pitiful bank, and would have passed through with no more than a tip of his hat, but the deputy stopped them in the middle of the square like a damn stickup.

That deputy was dead now. So it goes.

Ben clicked his tongue and edged his horse away from the bustle of the tipped stagecoach, where the boys were picking it clean. Charlie, who always kept Ben in the corner of his gaze, followed on foot.

"You picked up something shiny, Charlie?" Ben asked, his voice soft and low.

"Always told you I could shoot two pistols, boss."

"Where'd you pick up the second? You bought it back in Tombstone? And here I thought you spent the whole two days by my side at that pokey saloon, hmm, watchin' me watch that pretty old bargirl."

"She was past her prime," Charlie spat. He was spiteful about women.

"So when did you slip off the to armoury, Charlie? Buy yourself a nice new piece?"

Charlie looked bashful. He had sudden, rare fits of emotion. "Took it."

"Speak up."

"I took it off that idiot deputy's corpse. He ain't need it no more and this way I can do as good as two men for you, boss."

Ben dismounted his horse. He was not a small man but he liked to think he had a certain grace. A head taller than Charlie, almost. He patted his horse's thick neck, shushed her gently. Then he put his hand out for Charlie's stolen gun.

He was no magpie. He was a goddamn Phoenix.

"Open your trap," Ben told him, pulling back the safety.

Charlie scuffed his feet against the ground, petulant. Every strong emotion he possessed was child-like, no matter how many times Ben told him to act like a man. He cast a glance back at the gang, still hollering over the haul, and then back at Ben.

He licked his lips, parted his mouth.

Ben slipped the nuzzle of the gun against his tongue. Far enough in that the sight clipped the back of his teeth, the roof of his mouth. He pushed it in further, just on the cusp of making Charlie retch.

"We don't take dead men's shit. We take what covetous men have no dire need of. This is not your gun. You want another gun, you buy it yourself or you ask me."

He slid the wet pistol out of Charlie's mouth.

"You do right by me, Charlie Prince, and I'll not leave you wanting."

He reared his arm back and slung the pistol out into the desert. Charlie didn't move a muscle toward it. His right fist was clenching and flexing like he couldn't control it. He licked his lips again, as though he could taste Ben's anger upon them.

"Come on, now," Ben announced, his voice light again. "Let's divvy up with the boys."

He saddled up, and left Charlie to walk back to the coach in his horse's wake.

*

It was not that Ben never felt regret. He was widely revered as soulless, but found his will weaker than his fickle heart.

He bought Charlie Prince a pair of glimmering Schofields; new leather holsters and a belt. It cost him too much, and the store owner kept his weasely eyes on the Hand of God the whole while Ben was browsing his goods. When they haggled over price, he did not argue hard.

Charlie had been dolefully using the one gun since Ben's order. Too stubborn or too shamed to get another for himself. Ben did not like to think of this as an apology he owed; he did not owe men. It was a gift from a benevolent God to his disciple.

He took Charlie aside with a nod, while the boys were spit-roasting pigeons over the campfire. Charlie's glossy jacket reflected the firelight even at a distance, like he and the flame could not be parted from one another. Ben kept their heads close and low as though they were speaking strategy, but in fact he said nothing at all.

He unbuckled Charlie's belt.

Charlie Prince was as still as a hunted deer. His head frozen at a tilt, and his eyes too bright, too wide, too much. Ben let his belt drop to the floor, kicked it aside, gun and all. He had not seen Charlie without a weapon holstered to his side since he had first taken pity on him, saved him from his own fire. He was a slight man, though he stood tall, his shoulders strong and his back straight. He was a threat even without a gun.

He was a gun that only Ben could wield.

"Here," Ben murmured. He had the Schofields still in their lined box, pretty and neat, and he busied Charlie with them while he looped the new belt around his waist, slid the holsters to sit at either hip. Charlie turned the guns over reverently in his hands, watching as they snatched the gleam of the campfire and the moonlight.

"Boss—"

"No questions. No gratitude. What's done is done," Ben said, firm.

And then Charlie wavered forward, his step suddenly hesitant, his shoulders suddenly coy. His mouth was maybe two inches from Ben's, and Ben did not move back.

 

Ben had always known Charlie was not sweet on women. He was handsome and well-paid enough that he could've had his pick of loose girls in any town they passed through, but he always camped outside whatever room Ben had taken his girl to; made noises about protection and keeping watch. Ben had thought once or twice to telling him how to spot when a man was offering a night's company, since sure as hell Ben had bought that company on more than one occasion. But he suspected that Charlie would've soundly ignored that advice, too.

Ben had known it a long time. Charlie Prince was gone on him. There was nothing to be done about it.

A yelp from the campfire; laughter as Tommy dropped a burning log on his thigh and danced around like a toad from the pain. The ruckus didn't deter Charlie.

"If you put your mouth to mine," Ben muttered, "I won't be kissing you back."

Even less than an inch between them.

And then Charlie licked his lips and moved away. He holstered the Schofields, carefully closed the empty box and tucked it under his arm. "I'll look after 'em good, boss," he said, strained.

"You do that, Charlie Prince. Now let's hear no more of it."

Ben nodded him back to camp, a little ahead. And then he let out a deep, shaking breath and rubbed his mouth with his palm.

Charlie was a gun for him to fire, but Ben knew well that foolish men could too easily aim at their own chests.

*

They were close to twenty hits on the Southern Pacific now; it was a wonder the Company had any reserves left. Still, the money always seemed to dry up, or that antsy sort of boredom hit that made Ben round up the boys and head on for another raid. His whispering chain of intelligence told him there was a big haul coming up to Bisbee in the weeks hence; a heavy guard, a decent challenge.

He must have been approaching forty, though a man who knew his age to the day was a sure liar. Ben could feel a fatigue settling between his ribs. He thought for a time about not running the job. They were in a jovial town, not yet quite struck by the apathy drought brings, where the women weren't desperate enough to take up his advances and gave him sly smiles and made him buy them drinks and left him cold at the end of the night. He'd been chasing a redhead lass in particular, with a gap between her front teeth and shiny amber eyes, and he was enjoying her game. He might've liked to stay, take bets on how many nights she would hold out before he had her.

Charlie was watching her with a mean look. He could not understand people who didn't give Ben Wade what he asked of them.

She was in his lap this evening, laughing at Ben's attempts to woo her and swigging his ale and swaying out of time with the bar's sprightly pianist. Ben kept his hands on her hips, and sold her half a dozen different stories: wasn't she from New York, an oil heiress he'd seen holding court at the croupier's table? Hadn't he crossed her path in San Antonio, singing a dirge for her dead husband to earn her keep?

"You can list them states from A to Z, Mister," she said, smiling with her wide mouth, "But I still won't give you nothin' but a peck on the cheek for the effort."

Ben liked her greatly. He was close to drunk and was resting his cheek on her sun-kissed arm. But she was honest and gave him no more than a sweet kiss on his smiling lips and a pat on the cheek, before she meandered home after midnight.

He took a little air on the porch, humming to himself. Thought about sketching the street at night, the few lights spotted throughout the darkness like fireflies. But he could scarcely have held a pencil in this state.

Maybe they wouldn't do the Bisbee job. Stay here, woo stubborn women, drink decent whiskey. Fashion some kind of life.

Ben snorted at his own unuttered joke.

"Boss?"

"Quit lurkin', Charlie." There was a low bench on the porch, and Ben patted it genially for Charlie to sit by him. His Right Hand was a guard dog when Ben drank: too many stories of outlaws caught out by barmen, doubling their shots on the sly and making them dozy for when the marshals came. Ben did not mind his worrying. He did not mind very much on a night like this.

There was a companionable silence between them for a time. Ben sensed that Charlie had something on his mind but had no desire to make him spit it out. They could still hear the wild piano tunes from inside the bar, louder every time a patron stumbled out, and Ben's foot got to tapping along. He leaned his head back against the wooden wall, his eyes closed, listening to the hum of the cicadas, the vibrations of the saloon, the wind making gentle play with the tumbleweeds, and Charlie's unsteady breathing.

"I know you—" Charlie started.

He popped open the top two buttons of his coat, put his fists on his knees.

"I know that gal left you hangin', boss. I could see to it, if you like."

Ben kept his eyes shut. "You don't know what you're offerin', Charlie Prince."

"I do, I damn well do," Charlie hissed, and it was, maybe, the most spiteful he'd ever sounded towards Ben. Other men had suffered far worse, of course. But never Ben. He was reverent or he was silent.

It made Ben's temper short, his good mood dissolve. There was no definite part for Charlie Prince to play in Ben's imagined life, his homely little fantasy. The only fire he needed there was in the goddamn hearth.

"You'd get on your knees for me, is that what you're sayin'?" He opened his eyes slowly. Charlie was looking fiercely at the porch. "Let me make a whore of you? I'm payin' you, every job we run I'm payin' you. You know I've heard men call you Princess, make a mockery of you, Charlie; you'd let me do the same? Fuck your mouth and call you Princess?"

Charlie got to his feet in a flurry, his whole body coiled tight. His fists were visibly shaking at his sides, just abreast of his pistols, his nostrils flared with hot breath, his eyes huge. Ben suddenly felt almost sorry for every Pinkerton who'd seen this vision of Charlie as their last glimpse of the living world. He was a handsome demon, to be sure, but as death rattled around a man's ribcage, it'd be a mercy to see something soft and pleasant. Not Charlie Prince's fire-flecked eyes.

"Get some sleep, Charlie," Ben sighed. "I beg you."

He had hoped to end the night with his cheek lain on the breast of a sweet, rambunctious girl with a gap in her front teeth. Instead, the last thing he clearly remembered was the sound of Charlie's boots stomping into the darkness.

*

There was some kind of ruckus in the early hours, long after midnight but before sun-up. Ben had barely put his head to the pillow when it woke him. He thought, for a second, it was daybreak, but then he realised: the sky was ablaze. A building burning, not close enough for worry but enough to send folk running across town to catch a glimpse. Ben was only a traveller, passing through, and he could not bring himself to care enough.

He pressed the heels of his palms into his tired eyes, and swung his legs out of bed. The room he'd bought was on the third floor and all the more pricey for it, and he had a good view of the lay of the streets: people scampering and tripping towards the centre of the blaze, and not a one of them carrying a pail of water. A spooked horse, somehow got loose, cantered through the mess, scattering men left and right, its reins flapping like a second tail behind it. The sky was purple hued, a worldly bruise, only bright where the fire was lit and where it lapped the edges of low clouds. Damn near biblical.

He pulled on his trousers and boots, but no shirt. Felt around in the dark for a pipe and tobacco pouch. And then Ben made his way along the dark corridor outside his room, three doors on, and let himself into where Charlie Prince was meant to be laying his head.

Charlie, of course, was awake. He had been waiting.

He couldn't knock at Ben's goddamn door like any normal folk.

Ben took up his perch by the window, this time in Charlie's room, though there was not as nice a view from this angle. He packed his pipe full, brushed a few stray flecks of tobacco from his bare belly, and patted his pockets down for a match.

Charlie got up from the chair near the bed, attentive, and struck a match, and lit Ben's pipe for him. Then he sat back down.

Ben smoked a few good puffs of his pipe.

"Go on with it, then," he said at last.

There was a moment where the only thing moving was Ben's fingers on his pipe. He did not once think he'd misread the situation, just that Charlie wouldn't go through with it. And then—

Charlie's eyes, so deep a green they were almost black, never left Ben's the whole time. He hitched up his hips just enough to loosen his chaps; enough breathing space to get a hand down against his crotch. He was not flagrant, did not get his cock right out, but slid his legs apart and let his back slouch and rubbed at himself, watching Ben watch him do it. Ben supposed he did not need the friction that badly. Just his presence.

Ben put his pipe down carefully on the window seat, let it smoke itself. The fire was still hollering outside, and lit up his wide back like a splash of paint. He crossed the room slowly, let Charlie's gaze drink him in, toes to tip, and did not stop walking until he was so close to Charlie he could step no further. Charlie let out a high, quiet keen, and tilted his neck, and turned his head, and put his open mouth on Ben's groin. Dragged his teeth over the cloth.

"Now, now," Ben chided, rough. But he took pity, pressed his thick thumb against Charlie's bottom lip, slid it up inside his mouth to give him something to suckle on.

He hollowed his cheeks and trapped Ben's thumb between his tongue and the roof of his mouth, sucked warm and wet and hard. It would be nice, Ben thought, to have that mouth around his cock. The offer had certainly been made.

But it was not the sort of thing that a man could take back, and Ben did not enjoy his regrets.

So he cupped Charlie's jaw and let him take his fill that way, his hand rutting more and more urgently, until his eyes finally rolled shut, breathing frantically through his nose like a witless bull. He sucked on Ben's thumb even as he came. Ben felt the shudder of it in his bones.

Charlie kept his hand hidden once he had come. He did not want Ben to see his spilt mess.

"That's that, then," was all Ben said, after. Charlie could ask no more of him. He wiped his wet thumb on the inside of his pocket, and fetched his pipe, and left Charlie Prince utterly alone. He had found the boy in flame and solitude, and that was how he left him.

*

Jackson reported the next morning, far too much laughter in his tone, that Charlie, mad like a rabid dog, had stalked that pert redhead girl home last night and set fire to her front step. Watched it catch from the other side of the road, then had walked back to the inn with his hands in his pockets, happy as a lark. Might as well have been whistling.

*

They would not stay in any one place for too long. They'd take the fucking Bisbee job.

*

Charlie fell in with him long before Ben crossed paths with Dan Evans. It took just as little time as it had with Charlie for Dan to make a distinct impression.

That was why he did it, Ben supposed. After everything.

**Author's Note:**

> [littledozerdraws @ tumblr](http://littledozerdraws.tumblr.com/)   
>  [th_esaurus @ tumblr](http://drawsaurus.tumblr.com/)


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